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Obviously, every day is Earth Day to anyone who is paying attention to who we really are as creatures of the biosphere. After all, Life and our vitality emerge from the quality of the waters, air, and land of our blue planet. That’s why celebrating and caring for our natural world is central to the good life. After all, Earth’s health is the root of human health; Nature our true commonwealth of priceless value. That is the joy of Earth Day that can refresh each and every one of us.

One of Earth’s remarkable gifts is the cycle of life that Nature regenerates. In a sense all Life recycles. All life–including human life, from dust to dust, recycles.

Metaphorically, a kind of recycling is revealed as the Earth rotates, and sunrise lights each day; moonrise brightens night. Such a natural reality can boost one’s spirit of renewal. At this time, the week of the People’s Climate March, Flood Wall Street, the UN people’s summit and momentum on the divestment from fossil fuels, individual and collective strengths have been revitalizing. In community our strengths abound, our individuality shines.

Deepening actions and taking new actions to live in healthy and humane ways, loving and honoring each other and all creatures of Earth’s biosphere enable us to breathe anew.

As people marched, stood up, spoke out and sat-in, a sense of ourselves rose as citizens of the world and fellow creatures of the biosphere.

At home in our daily lives what does that look like? When we have choices to make, what do we choose to do? Take the time to walk a mile instead of driving it. Listen to the birds; feel the breeze or heat as air sensations. Greet a neighbor. Turn from Facebook to a real book. Read in solitude, to a child, with a group. Plant a seed, a sunflower, a tree, a garden. Cultivate with others. Remove a lawn. Refresh reuse with imagination. Ask, “Do I need to buy this thing?” Buy local. Help create a restoration. Build a local economy based on restoration, learning, service.

There’s much to do and we have the power. It’s the power not the purchase that marks our freedom. That’s the strength we need that in turn can strengthen and heal Earth, Mother Earth.

It’s time to express ourselves by enacting humane, ecological habits of being.

Each day, like a newly planted seed, can blossom into all kinds of new life. Researching the history of our Santa Monica Community Gardens reminds me of all the vitality that grows because people, those we know and those we can learn of in unexpected ways, care. I recently discovered this little film on one of our three community gardens. Finding what’s in a community garden is quite refreshing.

Sixty-eight years ago, the precise, complex, severe—ironically, stimulating—work that scientists in the United States had secretly done to figure out how to start a nuclear chain reaction in an extraordinary weapon that could blast the Axis Powers exploded our sense of humanity in a Japanese city. The United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 at 8:15 a.m., Japan time.

In a moment’s flash, tens of thousands of civilians and wildlife—school children, teenagers, mothers, fathers, nurses, reverends, musicians, fishermen, doctors, shopkeepers, artists, poets meshed with birds and butterflies, so many of Earth’s creatures—were vaporized, melted, scorched beyond recognition. Dropping that first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and another, three days later, on Nagasaki, Japan, seared our national character as it shattered the Pacific theater in the war.

Yes, World War II had brutalized people, but, worse, people normalized brutality.

Today, the political cartoonist Paul Conrad’s Chain Reaction sculpture helps us remember. It stands tall in Santa Monica, for all of us in the world, to call to mind: “This is a statement of peace. May it never become an epitaph.”

Yet, some city leaders think it should be demolished because it is not “safe.” What is not safe is forgetting. Save “Chain Reaction” because it is a way to save ourselves and our fellow creatures of the biosphere. The chain reaction we need is in us to believe in the beauty and goodness of life and what we can do to preserve it.

What does it take to heal ourselves and Mother Earth? Just our realization that getting to the roots of our problems or mistakes–being radical–enables our true sustaining abilities. That’s why we’re in the movement for environmental rights. We are far beyond and deeper than an environmental regulations campaign.

Listening to Dr. Mark Gold make the case at the Santa Monica College Earth week keynote address lifts the spirit and the radical momentum.

Today, Earth Day, is our deadline to speak out against the XL Keystone to the State Department. We have no human rights if we destroy our Mother Earth with more fossil fuel hot air. Don’t hold your breath–act!